Unit EQ: Why is it important for you to be "digitally literate"?
LEQ: Why is it important to triangulate a fact?
Activating Strategies:
Remind students of the "Dog Island" website and that they all "fell for it" and believed that it was real. Have them imagine that we didn't tell them that it was a fake site. What could have happened? They would have believed that the site was factual, without ever looking elsewhere to check. Tell them that they are going to learn about triangulation today. When you triangulate a fact, you find that fact in 3 places. If you can find the fact in 3 places, then it is generally considered "true". If you find a "fact" on a site, but can't find that same fact anywhere else, then the "fact" could be false.
Teaching Strategies and Distributed Guided Practice/Summarizing Prompts:
Ask students what they know about Wikipedia. As they answer, make sure they understand that it is site that anyone can add to. This can lead to benefits (the information on Wikipedia is up to date and mostly accurate) and problems (a person could potentially put false information on the site). Most of them have probably used Wikipedia because you can find so much information there, AND it's usually the first result site returned in a Google search.
Ask them to navigate to the Wikipedia website and search for a famous American from history--president, explorer, inventor, etc.. Once they find the Wikipedia entry about that person, they have to find one written fact about him/her. It should be a relatively simple fact.
Now, they have to find 2 other REPUTABLE sites on the Internet that have that same fact. They can do a Google search to find them. If they can find 2 other sites, then the fact is most likely true.
They have to paste the fact and the URL onto a word document 3 times to show the places they found their facts from and print it out at the end of the period.
Remind students of the "Dog Island" website and that they all "fell for it" and believed that it was real. Have them imagine that we didn't tell them that it was a fake site. What could have happened? They would have believed that the site was factual, without ever looking elsewhere to check. Tell them that they are going to learn about triangulation today. When you triangulate a fact, you find that fact in 3 places. If you can find the fact in 3 places, then it is generally considered "true". If you find a "fact" on a site, but can't find that same fact anywhere else, then the "fact" could be false.
Triangulation.gif
They have to paste the fact and the URL onto a word document 3 times to show the places they found their facts from and print it out at the end of the period.